Computational Biology

Abstract

During recent years, biological research has become increasingly based on large-scale experimentation such that data may be collected on an organismic scale. These data are voluminous, they are often very noisy, and their interpretation � and the configuration of the experiments involved � necessitates complex computer analysis. The respective computer methods are themselves an object of intensive research in a scientific discipline known as "computational biology" or "bioinformatics." Computational biology has a wide variety of facets that range from experiment configuration and low-level data analysis to computer-generated hypotheses

The breakthrough in protein structure prediction

“…Since the structure of a protein is fully specified by its sequence, attempts to deduce one from the otherknown as the protein folding problemhave been ongoing for half a century, rising in importance with the exponential growth in sequence databases and in frustration with the succession of methods that failed to bring decisive advance. Indeed, starting with the first decade of this century, there was a growing realization in the protein science community that this problem was one of the grand challenges of computational biology [1].…”